Osage

[Lance Foster]

There is a Chiwere word I recall, washunshun, was'uns'un, or something
like it, which means 'the movement of a snake,' or the undulating of a
river as the movement of a snake (think it was in Dorsey).

I wonder if washunshun (etc.) is related to wazhazhe? It seems so, and
that would help tie 'snake' and 'water' together, as the undulation, the
back and forth looping of both a river and a snake.

Lance

rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:

> John wrote:
> > For what it's worth 'middle water' could be a stream or river name,
> though
> > I don't recall such a stream.
>
> Can anyone can come up with the actual word in
> Osage?  In OP, there are actually several words
> we can gloss as 'middle' in English, varying
> according to whether we are talking about being in
> the middle of a crowd, the center of a village, or
> the middle of a lake, etc.
>
> I'm wondering if 'People of the Middle Water'
> might not be an ancient name for the Dhegihans
> before they broke up into separate tribes, with
> only the Osage retaining the original name.
>
> According to the 'Sacred Legend', recounted in
> Fletcher and La Flesche, the original home of
> the Omaha was in the Ohio River Valley.  On one
> particular day, they made a poorly planned and
> probably urgent crossing of the Mississippi.
> Some got across, while others were swept
> downstream.  Those who went downstream eventually
> made it across into Arkansas, where they became
> the Quapaw.  Those that made it across in the
> first attempt became the Omaha (including the
> Ponca, who had not yet split off).  The two
> groups apparently made no serious effort to get
> back together, and the Omaha wandered northwest
> across Iowa.  (The Ioway themselves had been with
> the Dhegihans at the time, and were among those
> who crossed successfully.)
>
> This event must have been crucial in Omaha history.
> Prior to the crossing, the Sacred Legend consists
> mainly of culture history mythology.  After the
> crossing, the Legend seems to be a fairly solid
> account of their wanderings and adventures.
>
> The Osage and Kaw are not mentioned in this story.
> I've read in some popular English accounts that
> they share this tradition, but I don't know the
> details.  If we suppose that they were part of
> this event, then we have a reasonable explanation
> of the term: the UmaNhaN were the 'Upstream People',
> the Ugaxpa were the 'Downstream People', and the
> Osage, who stayed in the middle, were the 'People
> of the Middle Water'.
>
> If the Osage and Kaw were not part of the crossing,
> however, as the Omaha Sacred Legend seems to imply,
> then a more interesting possibility becomes obvious.
> In that case, they were presumably already on the
> west side of the Mississippi before the Omahas and
> Quapaws came across, and likely settled in the
> lower Missouri valley where they were found later
> on.  If so, then Dhegihan territory prior to the
> crossing would have included both the lower Ohio
> valley and the lower Missouri valley, together with
> the stretch of the Mississippi that connects the
> mouths of these two rivers.  At this point, one has
> only to look at a map of North America to appreciate
> the implication of the name 'People of the Middle
> Waters'.  In an era when waterways were the easiest
> avenues of transportation, these people were living
> at the very crossroads of the continent.
>
> In this view, the Dhegihans must have been very
> much centered on the big rivers, which might explain
> how a 'water-monster' would come to be so important
> in their mythology.  In fact, this 'water-monster'
> might very well represent the River itself, seen
> both as a crawling snake and as the central god of
> their daily existence.
>
> There are some advantages to this hypothesis
> linguistically as well.  For one thing, it would
> give us good grounds for a dialect difference
> between 'West Dhegihan'-- Osage and Kaw-- and
> 'East Dhegihan'-- Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw.  The
> latter are distinguished by the complete collapse
> of MVS *u into *i.  More generally, it would tend
> to imply that Dhegihan must have been an unusually
> cosmopolitan language.  As a rule, languages that
> have a high interface with speakers of foreign
> languages tend to break down phonologically and
> grammatically, becoming more word centered and
> syntactically chaotic.  This seems to be what we
> are seeing in our respective Dhegihan languages,
> and probably accounts for why we are having so
> much trouble making sense of them.  Comparing
> Omaha-Ponca to the (originally) more insular
> Dakotan languages in MVS reminds me of nothing
> so much as comparing modern English with
> Icelandic in the Germanic languages.
>
> Rory